Colorado Baker Jack Phillips Speaks out After Supreme Court Ruling: ‘I Don’t Discriminate Against Anybody’

The Colorado baker who became the subject of a highly-watched Supreme Court case after his refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple has spoken out after Monday’s ruling, which went in his favor.

Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop appeared on the Today show Tuesday morning to discuss the case, saying that he serves every customer who enters his store.

“I don’t discriminate against anybody. I serve everybody that comes into my shop,” Phillips told Today anchors Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie. “I don’t create cakes for every message that people ask me to create.”

The baker added that had the two men asked him for cookies, cupcakes or some other baked good, he would have made the creation, but “a wedding cake is inherently religious, a wedding is an inherently religious event and the cake is a specific message.”

The court’s ruling, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, applied specifically to Phillips’ case and focused on the treatment of Phillips by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, who the court said failed to show neutral consideration and behaved in a hostile fashion toward Phillips due to his professed religious beliefs.

Phillips also noted on Today that he does not make Halloween cakes due to his beliefs. He added that he would not create a cake that was anti-American or disparaging against someone for any reason, “even cakes that would disparage people who identify as LGBT.”

He concluded, “Cakes have a message and this is one that I can’t create.”

In the court’s ruling, Kennedy wrote that the case’s central question, whether Phillips had the right to exercise his freedom of religion in the face of a state law the prohibits discrimination, should have been decided in a neutral environment.

“The Court’s precedents make clear that the baker, in his capacity as the owner of a business serving the public, might have his right to the free exercise of religion limited by generally applicable laws,” he wrote. “Still, the delicate question of when the free exercise of his religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power” should have been analyzed where “religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a factor.”

Photo Credit: Today